Blogs

Following hot off the heels of my recent blog post introducing Logic Apps and how I use the technology on cloudwithchris.com, I thought it made sense for the second post to continue the Logic Apps theme. This time, we’ll be focusing on Logic Apps preview (sometimes referred to as Logic Apps v2) - the evolution of Logic Apps. Typically when you deploy Logic Apps, you deploy it as a multi-tenanted service. There are some benefits to that, including the serverless capability, so being able to pay per execution rather than an overall infrastructure cost. But what if cost is less of a requirement for you? What if you care more about portability, greater performance, and ultimately control over your environment? If those are more along the lines of your requirements, then you may want to investigate the Logic Apps previewhttps://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/logic-apps/logic-apps-overview-preview. The Logic Apps preview builds upon the Azure Functions extensibility model. Yes, you read that right - Azure Logic Apps is effectively building on top of Azure Functions. Why should you care? Anywhere that Azure Functions can run, then Logic Apps can run.

Many years ago, I wrote a blog post which introduced Logic Apps at a very high level when they were initially released. Ahead of a blog post that I want to write on Logic Apps v2, I thought that it may be worth writing a more thorough recap of Logic Apps as a platform. Logic Apps is a Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering, which allows you to easily build visual workflow integrations. Whether that’s plumbing several microservices together, entirely different solutions within an enterprise, or some of the repetitive backend administrative tasks for a podcast or blog site, Logic Apps may be worth exploring.

Principal of least privilege is a commonly used phrase within the Technology Industry. The idea is that we’ll assign permissions of what the user needs to get the job done, rather than anything broader or more privileged. This helps reduce the blast radius in the event of a compromised account. This stretches to Azure resources at the management plane, but in some cases can also stretch to the data plane of those resources. We’ll be exploring these further in this blog post.

Often, I’m asked the question how do I get started with Azure? Are there any resources, tutorials, guides that you can recommend? I know about topic X, but how do I learn more? I’ve been working with, and continuously learning Azure over the past 7 years or so. When I started, the main resources were Microsoft Docs and community sites. Both great resorces, but there was a gap for a truly educational resource, rather than technical reference material. Enter Microsoft Learn.

In my blog post earlier this week, I mentioned that I recently spoke at the Northern Azure User Group. The other speaker for the evening was Scott Hanselman, who talked about his journey moving a 17 year old .NET App into Azure. This was his blog. Along the way, he called out some of the tools that he used along the way. One was a tool called securityheaders.com. As any engaged listener does, I took note of the tools that he used, and added them to my cloudwithchris.com backlog during the talk. When I later investigated the initial rating of the site, I received a score of an F - which appears to be the lowest possible score that you can receive! Given that I only allow HTTPS traffic to my site, I was surprised by this - so I begun looking into the recommendations further.

In case you missed it, Shannon Kuehn, Jamie Maguire, John Lunn and I joined Sarah Lean for a panel livestream on her channel talking about our experiences getting started with blogging, and our experiences with blogging platforms. In this post, I want to focus on the first aspect - how you can get started with blogging, and some of the common themes / recommendations I’ve heard, not just from this session, but from other active community contributors.

For some time now, I’ve been using Windows Terminal as my local terminal for interacting with my command-line tools for quite some time now. Whenever I’m demonstrating Kubernetes concepts or working with the Azure CLI, I’ll likely have had the Windows Terminal open at some point. I always get questioned about which terminal that is, and how people can get access to it. I recently put together a Cloud Drop on How Windows Terminal can make YOU productive with Azure, so I figured it’s time to also write up a blog post on the same! Whether you’re a Developer, DevOps Engineer, Infrastructure Operations or Data Scientist, you’ve probably had to interact with a command-line terminal / shell at some point, so I hope this will be useful for you!

I’ve recently released a few Cloud Drops episodes on Git related content. The Git Behind the Scenes video was incredibly well received. I’m also aware from my day-to-day discussions that there’s a mix of experiences with Git, so also made a Git 101 Video. In this Cloud World that we live in, version control is an important concept beyond the ’traditional’ developers. Infrastructure Engineers can now version control their Infrastructure as Code, or maintenance scripts. Data Scientists can version control their experiments and tests. And of course, developers can version control the code for their software. I also consider version control as a gateway or first step into the world of DevOps. Typically when you think about build and release pipelines, you are triggering based upon some version control event (e.g. a commit to a particular branch, a merge of a pull request, etc.). Over the past few years, I’ve seen a trend where organisations are looking to automate quickly, rather than relying on the traditional hands-on-keyboard approach which can be error-prone and time consuming. Whether we’re talking in this context about Infrastructure as Code, Application Code, database schemas as code, data science experiments or any other representation as code, it doesn’t matter. Typically the roads lead back to the same place, to version control. So in this blog post, I’ll be covering the fundamentals of Git and how to get started. For anyone that is particularly inclined, there will also be some information on what’s happening behind the scenes when you work through these fundamental concepts.

For some time, I’ve been using GitHub actions to update the content of my site (i.e. pages, descriptions, metadata, etc.). Through Hugo, these content updates automatically update the RSS feeds. This then makes the episodes appear in podcast services such as Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts and Spotify. However, throughout that time I have been manually uploading the podcast files to my storage account. It wasn’t a significant overhead, but I kept thinking that there must be a better way to do this. And, there is - I’ve implemented it! This blog post will walk you through why I’ve made these changes, how I made them and what the result is.

Part 4 - The final part (at least for now, until I find somewhere else that we can expand on with this)! This part will focus on porting the keys that we have recently generated onto our YubiKey device. I own a YubiKey NEO, so i’ll be using that.